Southern California -- this just in

Fed crackdown shows MS-13 gang is real threat, experts said

The decision last week by federal authorities to classify the Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gang as a “transnational criminal organization" has some experts hoping the move will put the gang on the run.

In Washington, both officials and experts said the designation shows that the federal government sees MS-13 as a real threat.

“There
is likely a sense that Mara's power comes from its ability to make
money,” said Juan Zarate, former deputy national security advisor under
President George W. Bush.

Hagar
Chemali, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, said Thursday: “It
is our hope that this action will generate caution within the formal
financial sector to the operations of this
group.

“Financial
institutions across the U.S. and foreign branches of U.S. financial
institutions are obligated to immediately identify and freeze property
or property interests of MS-13 and to
report any such blocked assets to the Treasury Department,” Chemali
said.

Local law enforcement officials cheered what they saw as the
unprecedented federal action, saying they hope it can significantly dent
the gang's power.

The designation gives the U.S. Treasury Department the power to freeze any financial assets from the gang or its members and prohibits financial institutions from engaging in any transactions with members of the group.

Officials said the move was designed to reduce the flow of gang money
within the United States and across the border. Authorities believe
money generated by MS-13 groups in the United States is funneled back to
the group's leadership in El Salvador. The designation is likely to
make it more difficult for gang members to use banks and wire transfers
to move their profits.

The gang is now believed to have as many
as 30,000 members and is rapidly expanding. More than 8,000 of those
members are said to be operating within the United States in more than
40 states and the District of Columbia.

“As
the reach of gangs becomes more international, the seizing and freezing
of assets becomes essential to addressing the violence that comes along
with it,” he said.

Among the other organizations to receive the designation are Japan's
Yakuza organized crime syndicate and Mexico's Zetas, whose leader,
Heriberto Lazcano, was killed by Mexican Marines last week. An armed
gang later stole his body from a funeral home.

MS-13 began
among El Salvadoran refugees -- many of them young ex-soldiers -- who
came to Los Angeles to escape civil war in their home country in the
1980s. Salvadorans congregated in large numbers in the Pico-Union
neighborhood and the area near MacArthur Park.

Experts say Mara Salvatrucha has behaved in far more sophisticated ways
than a typical L.A. street gang. It has diversified into
activities such as drugs, extortion and human trafficking.

The
gang's grip on immigrant neighborhoods of L.A. has loosened in recent
years amid a drop in crime and a crackdown by the Los Angeles Police
Department and other law enforcement agencies. But MS-13 has spread into
Central America and east as far as Washington, D.C., which has a large
Salvadoran population.

Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes said
Thursday that even though the gang was “not as overtly brutal” as it used
to be 20 years ago, MS-13 still terrorizes businesses, residents and
undocumented immigrants trying to scrape out a living.

“There's a fear among those trying to live a life without a commitment to the gangs,” he said.

In
the early 1990s, his staff discovered just how sophisticated the gang
could be when it stumbled upon a makeshift office in an abandoned
tenement. Inside, they found booklets laid out from a large restaurant
chain identifying neighborhoods with large concentrations of young
people.

“The workbooks had demographic information that spoke to
where the highest density of young people was,” Reyes said. “These guys
were following this fast food chain's workbooks as a way of deciding
where to form their cells. They were mapping out where the cells should
go in Pico-Union and Westlake and parts of South L.A.”

Over the
years, law enforcement crackdowns have deported and imprisoned many of
MS-13's gang members, but the gang has responded by becoming more
nuanced, Reyes said: “They don't even dress like gang members anymore.”

A Times investigation in 2007 found
that the push to send gang members back to El Salvador had unintended
consequences. Deporting MS-13 members to El Salvador enabled the gang to
expand its foothold there. Meanwhile, newly organized cells in El
Salvador established beachheads in the United States.

Wes McBride, executive director of the California Gang Investigators
Assn., said the federal action might provide the most help to small and
medium-size police agencies on the East Coast where MS-13 is growing the
fastest. Some of these departments, he said, don't have the resources
and experience in dealing with such gangs.

“L.A. was their birthplace, but they are stronger on the East Coast than they are here,” he said.

Even
today, many in Los Angeles' Salvadoran community are afraid to speak
publicly about MS-13. Some of those who did so Thursday expressed some
concern that the federal designation would tarnish the larger Salvadoran
community, which has been trying for years to escape the gang's shadow.

“During
the last 30 years, the El Salvadoran community has grown and has
developed from refugees to legal residents to American citizens,” said
Francisco Rivera, the president of the National Central American
Roundtable. “It's a problem if to be a Salvadoran immigrant is seen as
being synonymous with being a criminal. It would stigmatize a community
that has suffered a lot.”